If you are interested in forecasting, you might have heard of M-competitions. They played a pivotal role in developing forecasting principles, yet also sparked controversy. In this short post, I’ll briefly explain their historical significance and discuss their main findings. Before M-competitions, only few papers properly evaluated forecasting approaches. Statisticians assumed that if a model […]
Applied forecasting
Story of “Probabilistic forecasting of hourly emergency department arrivals”
The paper Back in 2020, when we were all siting in the COVID lockdown, I had a call with Bahman Rostami-Tabar to discuss one of our projects. He told me that he had an hourly data of an Emergency Department from a hospital in Wales, and suggested writing a paper for a healthcare audience to […]
Probabilistic forecasting of hourly emergency department arrivals
Authors: Bahman Rostami-Tabar, Jethro Browell, Ivan Svetunkov Journal: Health Systems Abstract: An accurate forecast of Emergency Department (ED) arrivals by an hour of the day is critical to meet patients’ demand. It enables planners to match ED staff to the number of arrivals, redeploy staff, and reconfigure units. In this study, we develop a model […]
Error Measures Flow Chart
In order to help master students of Lancaster University Managemen Science department, I have developed a flow chart, that acts as a basic guide on what error measures to use in different circumstances. This is not a complete and far from perfect flow chart, and it assumes that the decision maker knows what intermittent demand […]
Forecasting for the sake of forecasting
You probably have already noticed that we are in a pandemic of COVID-19 these days (breaking news: the UK has just announced a lockdown due to the virus). The number of news, memes and noise on the topic coming from around the world is astonishing! What is also astonishing is the number of posts on […]
M-competitions, from M4 to M5: reservations and expectations
UPDATE: I have also written a short post on “The role of M competitions in forecasting“, which gives historical perspective and a brief overview of the main findings of the previous competitions. Some of you might have noticed that the guidelines for the M5 competition have finally been released. Those of you who have previously […]
A simple combination of univariate models
Fotios Petropoulos and I have participated last year in M4 competition. Our approach performed well, finishing as 6th in the competition. This paper in International Journal of Forecasting explains what we used in our approach and why. Here’s the abstract: This paper describes the approach that we implemented for producing the point forecasts and prediction […]
State space ARIMA for supply-chain forecasting
John Boylan and I have been working lately on a paper, explaining the logic behind the ssarima() function from the smooth package. This paper has finally been accepted and published. Also, based on a modified version of the ssarima() function, I have developed a SSARIMA module for Smoothie software, developed by DemandWorks company. Both the […]
greybox package for R
I am delighted to announce a new package on CRAN. It is called “greybox”. I know, what my American friends will say, as soon as they see the name – they will claim that there is a typo, and that it should be “a” instead of “e”. But in fact no mistake was made – […]
smooth functions in 2017
Over the year 2017 the smooth package has grown from v1.6.0 to v2.3.1. Now it is much more mature and has more downloads. It even now has its own hex (thanks to Fotios Petropoulos): A lot of changes happened in 2017, and it is hard to mention all of them, but the major ones are: […]